“As a South African, I've seen China's activities on the continent up close,” says Ted Bauman, Senior Research Analyst at Banyan Hill Publishing. “It's clear that China's primary goal with foreign investment is geopolitical, not economic. The most consequential investments are undertaken by state owned companies, not by Chinese private capital. They tend to focus on infrastructure like highways, ports and dams, and on public networks like the electrical grid.”
The trouble is that “these investments help to bind countries to China politically, and through debt obligations,” explains Bauman.
Coronavirus may have shifted the dynamics in this relations. Both Politico and CNN has recent articles on the topic.
The following is from Politico:
China has spent untold billions in Africa since its emergence as a global power, investing in its natural resources, underwriting massive infrastructure projects and wooing its leaders. The campaign has bought China friends and allies in multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization, undermining the West’s once-reliable lock on the postwar world order while fueling its economy back home.
But that decades long quest for influence in Africa was gravely challenged last week when a group of disgruntled African ambassadors in Beijing wrote to Foreign Affairs Minister Wang Yi to complain that citizens from Togo, Nigeria and Benin living in Guangzhou, southern China, were evicted from their homes and made to undergo obligatory testing for Covid-19.
. . . While nobody expects China to lose its place as Africa’s biggest bilateral lender and trade partner, analysts and African diplomats say there is a distinct possibility of lasting damage. Reluctance from China to endorse a G-20 decision to suspend Africa’s debt payments until the end of the year has exacerbated the sense of frustration, they said.
And this is from CNN:
African students and expatriates in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou were last week subject to forced coronavirus testing and arbitrary 14-day self-quarantine, regardless of recent travel history, amid heightened fears of imported infections.
. . . However, echoing city officials in Guangzhou, [Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian] did not address specific accusations that authorities had enforced a policy of mandatory testing and a 14-day quarantine on all Africans, even when they had not left China in recent months; had not been in contact with a known Covid-19 patient; had just completed a 14-day isolation; or had certificates to show they were virus-free.
Notice how Politico is tossing in WHO in terms of China's friends and allies. I wonder how readers who have been backing WHO's performance in terms of their coronavirus response feel about that sentence.
There is also the statement that China is cautious on debt suspensions. One has to wonder if the Chinese have over-extended in terms of lending to countries across the globe. It is known that China has also provided support to Venezuela. If China gives Africa a break, would other countries demand the same, causing banking issues for China?
What is happening in Guangzhou is rather pathetic. A 14-day isolation for those who haven't even left China?
Recently, there were estimates of how deadly the coronavirus could be in Africa. The Imperial College London came up with 300,000 deaths in a best case scenario while the UN Economic Commission for Africa came up with 3.3 million in a worse case scenario. I wonder how the relationship will be 6 months to a year from now base on those figures.
As an ending, Al Jazeera published a letter from African intellectual leaders and this caught my eye:
Adopting the all-securitarian model of 'containment' of northern countries - often without much care to specific contexts - many African countries have imposed a brutal lockdown upon their populations; here and there, violation of curfew measures has been met with police violence. If such containment measures have met the agreement of middle classes shielded from crowded living conditions with some having the possibility to work from home, they have proved punitive and disruptive for those whose survival depends on informal activities.
This is a topic that is spreading across many countries. Those who work from home are having to deal with some life style changes, but the income is still coming through. Yet, for the poor who can't work from home, these lockdowns are economically devastating. At what point does the economic hit become too great of a burden and there has to be an acceptance that at least some increased level of deaths just has to be accepted (hopefully via managing the curve)?
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